Ted Cruz is a sniveling coward for sucking up to Donald Trump for so long

Ted Cruz angrily called Donald Trump a "sniveling coward" on Thursday. And that's fair enough, since Trump had launched a series of nasty, childish personal attacks about Cruz's wife.

But while we're talking about cowards, Cruz should also point the finger at himself.

After all, Cruz spent the first six months of this campaign sucking up to Trump at every opportunity, even though Trump's "problem with strong women," finally identified by Cruz on Thursday, was already well-established.

"I like Donald Trump," the Republican presidential candidate said on June 30 last year. "I think he's terrific. I think he's brash. I think he speaks the truth."

He was talking about the same Donald Trump who, as Fox News host Megyn Kelly pointed out at the first Republican debate in August, has a long history of disparaging women as "fat pigs," "dogs," "slobs," and "disgusting animals."

After that debate, Trump made sexist attacks against Kelly, accusing her of asking him "unfair" questions because there was "blood coming out of her - wherever." But Cruz was too cowardly to directly say Trump was in the wrong. Instead, he changed the subject.

"I'm not going to engage in the back and forth on personalities," Cruz said when asked about Trump's sexist remarks about Kelly, according to National Review. "Let me give you a story that is infinitely more important than the momentary bickering between different political candidates," he continued, changing the subject to Iran.

"I like Donald Trump," he said days later. "He's a friend of mine and I am grateful he is in the race.

Asked earlier this month why he waited so long to attack Trump, Cruz explained to Christian Broadcasting Network that he was afraid of what would happen.

"Donald is a force of nature," Cruz said. "I will give him credit for that, he is a media celebrity, and you can't take him on from a position of weakness."

So I guess that's why, as late as December, Cruz was tweeting that Trump was "terrific." Apparently, Cruz thought Trump wasn't terrific, but thought his position was too weak to say so. That's pretty cowardly.

What happened to Cruz is a microcosm of what has happened to the Republican Party. For years, "serious" GOP politicians have indulged charlatans and cranks, buffoons and bigots, in hopes they would help energize Republican voters without letting them getting near the levers of power.

The problem with treating these people seriously was that, sooner or later, one of them would be good enough at the performance to actually win the Republican nomination - and, apparently, that they would nastily attack your wife in front of a national audience in the process.

Even today, Cruz won't directly answer a question about whether he'll support Trump if he wins the nomination. "Donald Trump will not be the nominee," he said, against all available evidence.

Cruz cannot even bring himself to say he will not support the man who threatened to "spill the beans" on his wife.

What a sniveling coward.